The tiger's back.
"Mount Firmament. We're finally here."
Lucky let out a rumbling growl as the Lightcrusher padded to a halt. Three riders had made it at last to the island peak shrouded in mystery, and now Jinzhou's master-and-student pair slid down from their perches in front of and behind Rover.
He glanced at Changli, expression caught somewhere between gratitude and discomfort. The ride up had been anything but smooth, Lucky bounding over terrain with zero regard for passenger comfort. But with Changli seated behind him the entire way, he'd inadvertently gained two soft cushions pressed against his back.
A stark contrast to Jinhsi in front of him.
Those are at least F-plus-grade forward armor plates!
All I can say is, Changli and the Magistrate really are cut from the same cloth.
A low growl broke his train of thought. Lucky had planted itself in front of the group, blocking the mountain's entrance with its massive frame.
It was born here, a Tacet Discord native to Mount Firmament. The reason it had fled all the way to the Norfall Barrens was simple: it had sensed the disturbance spreading through the mountain and knew that staying meant being trapped in the time currents forever.
It had no intention of letting its master walk into the same fate.
Rover scratched behind its ears and smiled. "It's alright. A little disrupted time can't touch me."
Lucky considered this, huffed once, then dipped its head in acceptance before dissolving back into his Pangu Terminal.
The three exchanged a glance and stepped forward together, crossing the threshold into Mount Firmament. From this point on, the temporal distortion wasn't a trickle seeping outward. It was everywhere, a curse blanketing the entire mountain.
Any ordinary person who brushed against even a trace of it would be imprisoned in the gaps between seconds, frozen into a statue that could never move again.
And yet...
"Nothing. The time currents can't hurt me."
"I'm fine too. Full range of motion."
Rover and Jinhsi tested their limbs, confirming that the chaos saturating Mount Firmament had no hold on either of them. The Temporal Mandate they each carried rendered them immune. But the third member of their party...
"Ngh... !" Changli's face twisted. She doubled over, staggering backward.
Rover caught her before she fell.
As I thought. The Sentinel's Temporal Mandate has spiraled out of control.
"Changli!" both he and Jinhsi called out at once.
"I'm fine." She steadied her breathing. "This isn't entirely a bad thing. You two are special. Time can't harm you, but that also means you can't feel what's happening here, can't gauge how severe conditions have become."
She closed her eyes, letting the erosion wash through her, reading it the way a sailor reads a storm by the sting of salt spray.
"I can feel the flow of time fracturing. In some areas it's stopped completely. In others it races forward at impossible speed, or runs backward. The Sentinel's power has lost all coherence." Her voice dropped. "The situation is worse than either of you imagined. Far more urgent. It's possible... it's possible our Sentinel is approaching the end."
The words left her lips trembling. Changli, who never lost her composure, who navigated every crisis with a fox's calm, couldn't hold the mask in place.
Jinhsi went white.
The Sentinel was Jinzhou's guardian, its guide, the shared deity of an entire civilization. If the Sentinel fell, the blow to Jinzhou would be no different than a Threnodian descending upon them.
"You're not telling us everything," Rover said, checking her over. "The original cost of entering and leaving the mountain, the tenfold aging, that was calculated under stable temporal law. Now that the Sentinel's Temporal Mandate has gone haywire, that cost will spiral too."
And spiraling never meant spiraling in a kind direction.
Which meant if Changli left now, the years stripped from her wouldn't be predictable. Her hair going white by nightfall might be the gentle outcome. More likely, the moment she set one foot beyond the mountain's border, she'd crumble to dust. To bone.
And staying wasn't mercy either.
"Your time is decelerating," he said quietly. "If we can't shield you from the currents, you'll eventually freeze into a time statue. Trapped here forever. Unable to live, unable to die."
"Changli!" Jinhsi's eyes went wide with horror. She hadn't grasped how lethal Mount Firmament was for anyone without the Temporal Mandate.
The fact that Changli could still move at all meant the Sentinel was fighting, spending the last scraps of failing power to hold the worst of it back. How long that would last, no one could say.
"Exactly. We don't know how long, so let's move quickly." Changli smiled and stepped free of Rover's arms, standing on her own. "I need to get you both to the Sentinel while my time still flows. I'll fulfill my role as your guide. But if something happens to me along the way, Rover, Jinhsi, don't stop for me."
She'd known. Last night, studying the mountain's condition, she'd calculated this possibility and come anyway.
Because the battle at the Norfall Barrens front could shift at any moment. Someone had to deliver these two to the Sentinel as fast as possible, whatever the price.
And she'd chosen to be that price.
Because someone had to.
Because they were worth it.
"Sorry." Rover took her hand. "I don't plan on leaving anyone behind."
"Rover?!"
Before she could pull away, golden light surged from his grip and wrapped around her. The Temporal Mandate flooded through Changli's body in a warm tide.
The weight vanished. Her sluggish heartbeat, her labored breathing, the thick drag on every movement, all of it snapped back to normal in an instant. Blood flowed. Lungs filled. Time moved.
She stared at him.
Everyone present could see exactly what he'd done.
"Time alter: double accel."
Her time was being slowed by the mountain's distortion? Then he'd accelerate it back to normal speed.
The currents had halved her heartbeat, her breathing, her blood flow, everything decelerated by a factor of two. So he'd applied his own power to double her speed. Two negatives making a positive. Effect neutralized.
"Wait, Rover, the drain on you from this..."
"I'm strong. This is nothing."
He cut her off with the kind of blunt, unshakable confidence that left no room for argument, like a sovereign overruling a minister's protest by sheer force of will.
Though... the dynamic here feels less minister and more concubine...
Jinhsi hid a smile. She knew Changli had no counter for this. Her teacher's self-appointed role had always been "advisor." She'd offer counsel, lay out strategies, but never override a decision. For all her air of being the one pulling every string, the moment Rover pushed back with genuine conviction, she yielded.
"Let's go, guide." He turned to Changli with a quiet grin. "Your turn to lead."
The in-game map was nothing like the real mountain. If he tried to find the Sentinel's resting place from memory alone, they'd wander for hours. Having Changli here saved them more than she knew.
Golden eyes caught the dark silhouette before her.
She could feel it, his Temporal Mandate coursing through her veins, keeping her blood moving, her heart beating, shielding her from the crushing weight of frozen time.
Sustaining her life.
"Thank you, Rover..."
She carved his image deep into her memory. Then, without another word of hesitation or protest, she turned and led them forward.
Before long, the three of them witnessed what the time storm had done to Mount Firmament. Night had fallen on the world outside, but here within the mountain, an eternal noon held fast, pale and unmoving.
Birds hung motionless in the sky. Snowflakes hovered a breath above the ground, caught in the instant before landing. Countless residents stood frozen mid-step, mid-word, mid-breath, transformed into statues of living amber.
Fractsidus Followers, too, were locked in place among them.
A world where a single moment had been stretched into forever.
Everything sealed in time's amber.
"We have to save them. All of them." Jinhsi's voice broke as the scenes multiplied around her, and with them, memories long buried. Childhood memories. She knew this place. This was where she'd been given two lives.
Her home.
Then a familiar figure caught her eye.
"Xinyi?!"
Among the frozen residents stood a woman in a fine robe, silver hair pinned up in an elegant coil. No longer young, but poised, graceful, carrying the kind of beauty that deepened with age rather than fading.
Jinhsi rushed forward without hesitation, channeling her Forte into the frozen figure, working to thaw the bonds of stopped time.
Changli regarded the woman with open respect, then turned to Rover. "This is Xinyi. When Jinhsi was sent to Jinzhou City Hall as a child to be raised as Magistrate, Xinyi was one of the people who cared for her. Something like a foster mother."
Rover nodded. He already knew.
His expression turned complicated, though, remembering how certain... enthusiastic players in his past life had reacted when Xinyi first appeared in the story. The takes about fine wine aging well had been... prolific.
Now, seeing her in person?
...Some things are said for a reason, and I'm not going to pretend they were wrong.
Jinhsi freed Xinyi from the time-freeze.
"You're... the Magistrate?"
The silver-haired woman blinked at the young woman before her. She'd resigned from Jinzhou City Hall years ago and retired to Mount Firmament. The little girl she remembered had grown into someone remarkable.
"Xinyi, it's me. Don't worry. I'm going to save everyone."
Jinhsi was already pouring everything she had into the effort. Rover joined her without a second thought, and together they freed every frozen resident in the area.
Then, pooling their Temporal Mandates, they restored one of the less disrupted zones to a normal flow of time, creating a temporary shelter where Mount Firmament's people could exist safely.
A place to breathe while the mountain held its breath.